Tennessee Valley Authority Awards Subnet Project to Facilitate NERC CIP Secure IED Access

SUBNET Solutions Inc. has been awarded the PowerWAN Secure Remote Device Access Project by Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA).

TVA, like most utilities, is faced with the task of securing access to their substation IEDs to meet NERC CIP requirements. TVA’s PowerWAN Secure Remote Device Access Project required a solution that could provide per-user IED authentication and auditing without requiring excessive management. SUBNET’s My IEDs application, running on SUBNET’s EnterpriseSERVER.NET platform, will provide centralized role-based access control (RBAC) of TVA IEDs connected to its PowerWAN substation network.

“With the increasing complexity of substation automation components, remote IED access becomes a necessity,” says John Wesley Stewart from TVA’s System Assessment and Standards group. “In regulating this access in a secure and auditable manner, SUBNET’s My IEDs Solutions provides a service critical to TVA’s CIP compliance effort.”

SUBNET’s My IEDs application leverages an electric utility’s existing access control infrastructure, such as Active Directory/LDAP and multi-factor authentication technologies such as smart cards and RSA tokens. My IEDs has been implemented by all types of electric utilities including major investor-owned utilities, cooperatives and municipal utilities such as Southern Company, Salt River Project, Southwest Transmission Cooperative and ENMAX.

By implementing this My IEDs solution, TVA is also putting in place the EnterpriseSERVER.NET platform, which could also allow for the integration of future substation intelligence solutions such as automated fault record archiving (My Faults) and real-time asset monitoring enabling condition based maintenance (My Assets).